I’d tried to make sure the event was open to linked data sceptics as well as the converted, and to people who worked in museums but didn’t consider themselves technical, so that the discussions could be grounded in the reality of quotidian museum work.  The original event page talked about who might come and why the meetup was being organised, but I’m not sure anyone quite knew what to expect.

After some time to introduce ourselves and mingle, we broke up into smaller groups to discuss topics suggested by the group. Topics included ‘find all paintings by Stubbs (or Boucher or Picasso)’, real world use cases and ‘what is useful for real people and audiences?’, ‘ useful types/formats of museum data’ and ‘interestingness’.

There were varying levels of experience with and understanding of linked data, so some discussions included an overview of what linked data meant to various people. You may be wondering yourself, so I’ve included Rhiannon’s description from her ‘interestingness’ group discussion:

Linked data means the idea that it would be really great if everyone (museums and anyone who has information in a digital format either about their collections or about their events) released it to an agreed standard so that developers could build really cool things with it that would be really useful to the general public in the real world.

Each discussion has been written up in more detail on a wiki page, Linking Museums write-up, and comments are still being added. If you’re interested in the technical discussion or helping out, that’s the best place to start.  I’ve summarised my thoughts briefly, and also included those of two other attendees, Gemma and Rhiannon, in order to bring the less geeky museum voice into the discussion.

Personally, I was delighted by how well it went.  The discussion was beautifully challenging and provoking, and I learnt how much people want our data to be out there for them to play with.  Getting a glimpse of how people saw museums was interesting (even when I felt I had to apologise for how slow we are at some things). Before the event I’d said I wanted to break out of the ‘chicken and egg’ problem of not knowing what format to publish in to reach a critical mass of potential users – the message I got very strongly from people there was:

stop worrying and start doing

It’s too soon to worry about formats, just get your data online – ideally as one structured page per ‘thing’, then link to other things. Include a licence so that people know whether or how they can use the data.

Talking to people who weren’t familiar with museum work forced me to examine assumptions I held about our audiences and our data. Explaining the contexts in which we worked – often with limited resources, and little time to experiment or think beyond the current project or task list – hopefully helped others understand why museums move slowly despite the best intentions of their staff.

To me, it also shows that we need to do a better job of outreach to tech people – they don’t know how to get in touch and offer to help, we’re still working out how we can make the most of their expertise and energy; but we also need to explain exactly how bad or messy some of our data is and why ‘just getting it all out there’ won’t necessarily help if a record consists only of an accession number.  You can help here – leave a comment with your favourite example of crap data in your collections database.

Gemma’s report

“Our group was given the fantastically broad title of interestingness or serendipity.  We spoke about the ways people could stumble across museum data or information. This developed into talking about how to keep people exploring data and staying on your site.

The ways people could come across your data hinged on making it accessible to developers, using a common language.  For example using thesauri such as Getty’s Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) or Union List of Artist Names (ULAN).

Although there are difficulties in getting museum staff to agree on terminology or choosing a thesaurus, there are clear benefits to organising data in such a way.  For example drawing together works by the same artists.  We then speculated about the ways people would enjoy being able to search for all of an artist’s work using one site.  And how eventually they may even be able to select a work and order a print, thereby generating income for the institution.

We discussed how people enjoy playing games such as six degrees of separation, and how this could be a way of drawing in visitors to a site to see if, using museum data they could find ways of linking themselves to famous historic people or people associated with museum collections.  We speculated about tapping into the genealogical sector to attract people to such sites.

We spoke about foursquare type games where people can collect awards or keep people drilling down through data, and using metadata to keep them interested and continuing to search or play a game on your site.

I found the evening inspiring, and really enjoyed spending time with such knowledgeable techies who were so interested in using museum data.”

Rhiannon’s report

“I was a little nervous about attending this event because my knowledge of Linked Data was sketchy to say the least (I required, for instance, a refresher on what it actually meant!). I was persuaded to attend however and I’m glad that I did. 

I was on a table that was discussing ‘what might real people use it for’? There were about 8-10 of us on the table and I think the majority were coming at the question from a developer rather than a museum perspective.

I took a few things away with me which I hope sound more realistic than negative.  The first was that it seemed to me to be a great knowledge divide between the people who want the data and the people who have the data.  The message from developers was very much ‘we could do such cool stuff, it would be so useful to so many people, and would really benefit museums, why aren’t more museums publishing the data for us to do this?’  The immediate answer that sprung to my mind was ‘because they don’t know that they should be for a start’.  Now I’m not talking about bigger museums here, I’m possibly not even talking about London museums, but I’m talking about your regional museum, which might only have a couple of members of staff, or even, one voluntary curator who only comes in once a week.  It seems to me that those museums might not even think of themselves as having data, let alone know that other people might want it, or how to go about publishing it.  Even if they do know these basic things, they may have other worries.  We all know museum professionals who are still quite skeptical about digital, and about web 2.0, and about the risks to authority, copyright etc etc and it felt to me like there was a colossal amount of work to be done in explaining to these people why releasing their data would be a good thing.

There is also, however, a probably-equally important explanation that needs to happen (and this evening was very important towards that) so that the world of developers understands the worries of these museum professionals, which, whilst they can seem frustrating, are often very real and important.  There are also some very practical reasons why museum data just may not be in a state to be released either because it’s not that detailed, or because it’s not in a state to be made public, for whatever reason.

The second big thing I took away occurred once the discussions began to round up, when discussion turned to ’so what are you going to do now?’  It seems to me that two key barriers that need to be overcome before any of us can effect any real change are a) the lack of influence and b) the lack of time that most people who believe that all this is a good idea has to actually influence any national or international change.  It may be that these things can change, but my feeling is that there is a lot of work to be done at this basic level before we can really start achieving the undoubtedly more exciting and useful goals that linked data could achieve.”

What next?

If you want to help get some more real examples out there in the wild, I’m trying to get some object pages published based on the suggestions, sample markup and concrete examples collected at Sample NMSI objects as Linked Data and Thoughts on linked data and the Science Museum.

If you want to ’stop worrying and start doing’ there are also some good examples of use cases and possible solutions in the ‘What is useful for real people and audiences? (Use cases)’ section of the event summary.

The first event went so well that a number of people asked for another one – get in touch if you want to help, or organise one yourself if you’re feeling impatient! All you need is a space and some way to tell people about it.

The wiki is useful as a place for publishing information, but would a mailing list or some other way of working together also be useful?

Thanks

My thanks to Paul Rowe, whose visit to London inspired the timing, and Ian Davis, whose response to a tentative tweet reassured me that linked data people would be interested in meeting with museum people…  And more than anything, thanks to everyone who turned up and participated, and to those who’ve kept editing and commenting and sharing on the wiki.

About the writers

Gemma is Assistant Collections Officer, Croydon Museum Service. Rhiannon is E-Learning Officer (Web), Museum of London. Mia is Lead Web Developer, Science Museum. We’re all committee members for the Museums Computer Group.  Sign up to the MCG email list for discussions between museum, gallery and higher education professionals about the various uses of computing in museum contexts and advance notice of any future events.

[This week's guest post is by Rhiannon Looseley, E-Learning Officer (Web), Museum of London, and MCG Committee member. It was originally published on her blog]

Early (very early) on Thursday morning, I got up and got the 7.03 train from Euston to Birmingham for this year’s Museums Computer Group (MCG) Spring Meeting. The theme of the day was ‘Programming, Promotion and Policy’ and I was looking forward to the interesting range of topics that we had on the programme, particularly hearing from the people behind the immensely successful way in which the story of the Staffordshire Hoard find was announced, and the round-table discussion in the afternoon about what the post-election climate has in store for our sector.

The day didn’t disappoint. What I particularly liked, having never attended one of the smaller MCG meeting before, was the atmosphere. Rather than the usual conference atmosphere at the bigger meetings, this was much more informal, chatty, and friendly. I’ve really enjoyed the two UK Museums on the web conferences that I’ve attended but this was refreshingly different.

First up after Ross’s introduction and a few words about Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG) from Jo Smith, was my fellow MCG committee member Linda Spurdle. Linda is the Digital Manager at BMAG and talked about some of the projects that she is working on, particularly the new BMAG galleries – Birmingham: A city in the making – for which stories and images will be gathered from the community using social media. Linda talked enthusiastically of the vibrant and flourishing social media scene in Birmingham which I hadn’t heard about before. It was really cheering to hear about a community who are proud of their city and keen to get involved in cultural projects. Linda also talked a little about the Staffordshire Hoard and the amazing scenes of 3-4-hour long queues outside BMAG when it first went on display. 65,000 people visited the Hoard in 19 days and web visit-or figures increased 12-fold. The effect of this amazing find has been felt right across BMAG and it sounds as if staff across the organisation have risen to the occasion to make the most of it, with conservators offering to blog about their work to clean up the treasures and live-question-and-answer sessions happening in the galleries and online. This set the tone for the day for me as the Staffordshire Hoard was a recurring theme throughout the day and what really struck me was the admirable way in which BMAG and all those involved in the project had acted so fast and in such an effective and organised fashion.

Immediately following on from Linda’s talk came Tony Adams from Stoke Museums who also have parts of the Staffordshire Hoard on display. Tony was talking about an ambitious project he is working on to create a virtual Staffordshire museum online by pulling together data from all the museums across the region which will in turn also feed into the Culture Grid and Europeana. I have to admit to glazing over slightly once James Grimster, the web developer for the project started talking the techy acronyms of web geekery which I’m afraid still evade my understanding. Nevertheless, I was already hooked on the atmosphere in the room and already feeling that now-familiar buzz that I get once I realise that a conference is giving me ideas and helping me to think properly again (I blogged on the evening of the conference about what I love about conferences and this freeing up of my thought processes is a key aspect). What particularly struck me about Tony’s talk was the fact that he described the project as ‘writing the rule book’ as they go along. This, to me, would feel a little frightening in a world where we’re increasingly encouraged to be accountable at all times, but I admired Tony’s brave and enthusiastic attitude as he described how exciting he found this.

After these two talks, Ross Parry, chair of the MCG, set the tone for the relaxed nature of the day by taking time out of the programme to encourage some discussion about the talks. He encouraged Jeremy Ottevanger (recently of the Museum of London, now at the Imperial War Museum but also heavily involved in the Europeana project) to describe what was going through his head as he heard James talking through the technical aspects of the Staffordshire museums website and the way that data would be collected. I don’t know if Jeremy will blog Thursday’s conference but I hope he will as he might be able to give you a better idea of some of the things James covered which I couldn’t do any justice to here. Keep an eye on Jeremy’s blog over the coming weeks!

After a short break we moved on to the next part of the day: the Staffordshire Hoard and the publicity campaign around it. This session stemmed from an idea by another committee member (and key organiser of the spring meeting) Gemma Sturtridge who was really struck when the story of the breathtaking find broke by the coordinated way in which everyone pulled together so that nothing was leaked in advance and that various aspects of a slick media campaign exploded all at once. As a committee we agreed that hearing about how this had happened would provide valuable lessons to us all. We weren’t wrong.

The session started with an interesting talk by Dan Pett of the Portable Antiquities Scheme who is responsible for building theStaffordshire Hoard website (Dan has shared his slides for his talkonline already). As an archaeologist by background, Dan was able to give us an insight into how big a story the Portable Antiquities Scheme immediately realised this was. Whereas a usual find is worth around £50-100, this one was valued at about £3,285,000! The impressive thing to note about Dan’s work on the website is that he was given 1 week’s notice and no budget to build it, and so it cost £0 to make! Using textpattern, Dan built a website which relied heavily on social media. All the images were uploaded to Flickr under a Creative Commons license (so no images were actually hosted on the server making the site faster under the strain of a lot of visitors) which proved popular as it allowed people to make use of them on their own blogs and websites and the site also pulled in people’s tweets as the news broke.

Once the news broke the website did come under a certain amount of strain with 2000 connections a second at one point but Dan was able to harness the power of the great network of museum web geeks that we have on Twitter to ask for advice on what to do to manage this. A quarter of a million people visited the site within three days.

Following on from Dan, we heard from Kerri Keiwan of the Art Fund about the tremendous ‘Save the Stafforshire Hoard’ campaign which raised money to ensure that it was able to stay on display in the region. I’m aware that this post if getting longer and longer so I’m not going to go into detail about every talk here but after Kerri, we heard from Jon Pratty, a man with many hats, but talking here with his journalist hat on who gave some very insightful tips on breaking news stories on a museum website. These included amongst much other valuable advice, discussing what stories you will have coming up 6 months in advance, making sure that you always put a sensible and useful subject when you email a press release to journalists, and making sure you always attach a small, unedited picture to your press release.

During the lunch break we had an interesting tour of the Museums Collections Centre where the meeting was held, getting a behind-the-scenes insight into BMAG’s collections which are housed here.

After lunch, Caroline Moore of Renaissance East Midlands talked to us about the project that she and Bryony Robbins are working on at present called Mubu which gathers together a series of learning and community projects across the East Midlands which all have a digital output. Caroline also touched on the project that I’ve blogged about before called My Life as an Object which used four different social media platforms over four weeks to experiment with engaging audiences with museum collections in different ways. It was a project with Rattle Central and I was delighted that Caroline gave me a copy of the newspaper that was produced to gather together the results of the projects at the end.

We then moved on to the open mic session which I was chairing. This is where we open up the floor to up to speakers to talk about a subject of their choice for 5 minutes, without slides and with only internet access. The call that we had put out had been fairly general but it was great to see that actually the four talks that were eventually presented pulled together some of the themes for the day quite nicely.

Firstly we heard from Laura Whitton from the Collections Trust who talked about the new Culture Grid website which has recently been launched and had already been on everyone’s lips earlier in the day. The website basically pulls together data from across the sector and allows cross collections searches – check it out, it’s pretty cool!

Next up was Lucinda Donnachie from the National Maritime Museum with a quick five minutes on a project she’s working on withwww.naval-history.net to improve the data that they have based on an old card catalogue of 20,000 vessels.

Following on from Lucinda, we heard from Rebecca Cadwallader about the fascinating http://www.wevee.co.uk/ which encourages users to ‘mashup’ film footage from the UK Film Council to make their own creations.

Lastly, Jon Pratty gave an off-the-cuff presentation of a personal project he’s working on called Americanium which pulls together RSS feeds from various different cultural sites to make a website which is simple to produce and pulls together a lot of American cultural material in one place – quite a cool idea! This was the first time Jon had talked about this project in the UK so you could say it was a national premier!

We then moved on to the round table discussion of the effect of the events of 6 May 2010 on the digital heritage sector. My notes here become quite sketchy because there was so much to say and many people speaking. I hope I can give a flavour of what was said but I can’t promise that there aren’t inaccuracies. Here are a few of the main points:

Katie Peckacar, MLA Policy Advisor warned us that we still don’t know a lot of what will happen but that it looks like we will be a lot more scrutinised than we were about why projects are important and whether or not they are aligned to our organisational strategies and aims. Partnerships with software developers and academics who have priorities aligned to ours will be important. An example model Katie quoted was the Tank Museum which has given a games company access to their collections in order to create a game which they can then use for free. MLA are also putting together a kind of buddying system to pair up software developers in academia who are interested in solving practical problems with museums and various events and hack days are being organised to further these kinds of working models.

Katie had to leave at that point but it was then the turn of Bridget McKenzie of Flow Associates to put her thoughts across. Bridget wants to push for a more creative cultural strategy – one that’s much more about advocating the value of cultural content to the economy and to cultural public life rather than risk a return to silo-ised way of working that might come out focussing in to much on local need and the improving each institution. Bridget spoke of the need for a body to strongly advocate for the value of our content and the potential of the services that that content can make rather than the fun stuff that technology enables you can do for the sake of it.

Jon Pratty pointed out at this point that the digital inclusion agenda and the work that Martha Lane Fox is doing to to regenerate and to empower and to join people up using technology seems to be one of the few growth areas of digital heritage. He suggested that perhaps culturally we should be projecting ourselves over towards that sector. Jon advocated, along similar lines to Katie, ensuring that your organisation has a very joined up and cross-thinking perspective when writing its digital strategy to ensure it is aligned with business plans etc before applying for funding.

These interesting and valuable discussions were rounded up with Ross’s summing up of the themes for the day and then some of us moved on to see the Staffordshire Hoard for real at BMAG in Birmingham City Centre. This was a great ending to a really interesting day. I would recommend going to see the Hoard if you haven’t already. I know very little about the Anglo-Saxons but the thing that struck me was the detail and the amazing craftsmanship of these sometimes tiny objects that were thought to have been produced around 600AD. We were lucky enough to get a curator’s tour which made the whole thing so much more meaningful and really rounded off a great day. Once again, I was struck by how quickly and effectively BMAG must have responded to the news of the find. In a sector that can sometimes feel slow to move, I was really struck by how well they appear to have worked together so that the hoard could be dug up, put on display, funded and publicised so smoothly in such a short time.

I hope that those of you that weren’t there on the day have been able to get some sense of what went on and the positive threads of enthusiasm, creativity, inspiration and joined-up thinking that went on. It was a great, informal, friendly day that, as conferences often do, reminded me of my passion for the sector I work in and the work I do. I hope that those of you were there shared my enjoyment of the day and urge you all to keep an eye on the meetings section of the Museums Computer Group website for details of our annual conference which should be held in London in November/December of this year.

Museums Collections Centre, Birmingham

25 Dollman Street, Birmingham B7 4RQ
Training Room

How to get there

Take the train from Birmingham New Street to Duddeston station (5 minute journey).
The MCC is then a 5-10 minute walk from Duddeston station.

Trains to Duddeston from Birmingham New Street before 10am:

9.17 Walsall train Platform 2A arrives 9.22

9.25 Lichfield train Platform 7A arrives 9.29

9.47 Walsall train Platform 2A arrives 9.52

MCC Tel: 0121 303 0190.
View Museums Collection Centre (MCC) in a larger map

About the MCC

The Museums Collections Centre in Nechells is a 1.5 hectare site that contains over 80 per cent of Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery’s stored collections under one roof.

Four recent events have prompted me to think about trending topics in digital heritage:

- Museums and the Web 2010;
- Museums, Mobile Devices and Social Media;
- MuseumNext;
- Museums & Heritage Show

This post gave me the opportunity to revisit my notes and attempt to pull out some common threads. Here are three:

Sober social media

At MW 2010, the ever-prescient Sebastian Chan described his investigation of how school children and teachers accessed the Powerhouse Museum website. To his surprise, these educational users were not using the modularised collections database with its tags and other free metadata. Instead, they preferred 10-year-old microsites whose content was no longer maintained. These silos of stranded content without web 2.0 features and without links into other areas of the Powerhouse site, appeal to teachers because they are walled gardens within which students could complete structured classroom activities. Statistics showing a dramatic drop in the number of students accessing the museum sites during school holidays, demonstrated the failure to of the microsites to convert formal learners to informal explorers. Seb’s findings reinforce experiences at the British Museum and Museum of London, where dated islands of content on sites like Ancient Egypt and Great Fire of London Game attract massive numbers of educational visitors.

In attempt to deliver more current content to school audiences, Seb and his team repurposed records and pushed them out to an external resource portal for teachers at www.thelearningfederation.edu.au. However, because of the time and effort involved in repackaging museum data for the external venue, the practice was not sustainable. Seb’s presentation and its ensuing discussion in which Peter Samis asked what we would do if, when asked, teachers said they preferred microsites to the integrated web 2.0 websites we are designing, drove home for me that social media has now come full circle. Now that the initial excitement has worn off, and data on the usage of completed projects is available to analyse, we are entering a more sober phase. We are returning to questions we have always asked, namely, how does what we are building meet (or not meet) the needs of the specific audience it is intended to serve?

Further examples of this trend emerged at MW including Koula Charitonos’s research on Tate Kids, which showed that social media features like commenting on artworks did not work for primary school children. Even at MuseumNext, where the strong marketing focus meant that some attendees may have been more inclined to hype social media, there was a sense that the honeymoon is over. Seb summed things up simply: ‘Setting data free is not enough because our audiences may not get it.’

Mobile uncertainty

I followed the fascinating discussions from Museums, Mobile Devices and Social Media on Twitter, attended the Mobile Untours un-session at MW, and saw lots of promising iPhone apps the M&H Show, at MW. Still, I cannot shake the feeling that the mobile space is dauntingly chaotic. There has been undeniable progress since Kate Haley Goldman talked about moving beyond the pilot stage with mobile in 2007. After trialing various devices during its Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint exhibition, SFMOMA forged ahead with partner NousGuide to launch an iPhone guide that launched earlier this year. The Brooklyn Museum, IMA and National Gallery are all successfully serving up iPhone apps and nearly every established audio guide vendor is offering or plans to offer iPhone versions of the traditional tour. Clearly, Apple has cracked a model – but it is still only one model.

For many institutions, including my own, for which Apple devices present numerous practical and logistical challenges, the way forward for mobile is far from clear. Android devices are promising, but not mature, with great variation in implementation across hardware manufacturers. (A developer from Toura complained to me about the problems building for Android phones with inconsistent screen resolutions.) Other mobile platforms seem at risk of expiring without notice. Roaming costs across national borders still discourage phone usage by foreign visitors. And hardware is only one piece of the puzzle: What about the types of interactions they provide?

The Un-tours unconference session at MW identified some potential alternatives to the traditional gallery tour based on serendipity, user generated content (oral histories, photos), geo-positioning and theatrical soundscapes like those created by multimedia artist Janet Cardiff. The exhibition floors at MW and M&H Show were scattered with Augmented Reality and 3D applications – most of which were in limited use within highly specific contexts. At MuseumNext, Mike Ellis pointed out the ubiquitousness of text messaging which a few companies like SCVNGR are exploiting. Despite numerous exciting ideas, it feels like practical constraints are still holding back museums from jumping into meaningful experimentation in the mobile space.

Conversations

Another strand from the last few weeks was discussion-based interpretation. Collaborating with the Portland Museum of Art, the team from Smarthistory (Beth Harris and Steven Zucker) recorded museum staff talking in pairs about works of art. The resulting videos were shown to visitors whose reactions were analysed. Visitors seemed to appreciate the more casual, conversational approach which was intended to draw them into the debate and empower them to form their own opinions. I was encouraged that the technique was found to work with non-Western art as well as previously tested Western artworks. Presumably, this initial pilot project will be developed further.

Another interesting link to discussion-based interpretation surfaced at Museums, Mobile Devices and Social Media: PlayDecide – designed to get groups of people talking about controversial topics. At MuseumNext, Georgina Bath Goodlander pushed these ideas further still with inspired examples of visitor participation at the Luce Foundation Centre for American Art. Among the examples she described were informal audio recordings of docents telling stories about the collection which are available for visitors to browse, and a plans for a new Alternative Reality game which builds on the success of Ghosts of a Chance.

I am interested to hear what others have observed, and, as many of our colleagues head to Los Angeles next week, I am curious to see what new themes may emerge from the technology sessions at AAM.

It’s said that a week is a long time in politics. Right now, in the few days after of a General Election, that’s even more the case. What does the result mean for the UK’s cultural heritage sector? I haven’t a clue. However, it was good to be reminded recently of policy of the re-introduction of free museum entry for the national museums (implemented in 2001). Even with big spending cuts apparently on the horizon, I can’t see this policy being reversed any time soon – and for that, we should be thankful.

Meanwhile, lets have a quick review of the week in cultural heritage.

Blog post of the week goes to Ian Edelman, who has written a review of the introduction of a ‘reviews’ function for museums on the Hampshire County Council website, titled What if they say something bad about us?.

I won’t bother to repeat Ian’s findings here – you can go and read the blog post for yourself – but it did get me thinking about other places in which you can read and post reviews of museums.

One key destination where you can find information about museums, including reviews, is of course Google. They’ve been steadily evolving their search engine, so that searches for museums and other attractions no longer just return a list of links to external web pages, but instead often include a link to Google’s own web page for that destination. These pages started out as part of a ‘Local Business’ search option, but have since been renamed “Place Pages” and feature prominently in regular Google searches, as well as on their Maps search and on searches from a mobile phone.

Whilst Google Place Pages are managed by Google, you can ‘claim your business’ (via a few different means, such a postcard that’s physically posted to you), which gives you a certain amount of control over the page, including the ability to add extra contact details and a short description.

More significant though is that Google Place pages include reviews. These are aggregated from sites such as Qype and TripAdvisor, as well including those posted directly to the page. Each review is associated with a star rating (out of five), which are used to calculate an average. Google’s magic software even automatically picks out a few key ‘themes’ from the reviews in a section called ‘what people are saying about’ – for example, the British Museum’s page picks out ‘collection’, ‘food’ and ’setting’, each of which get a percentage-based ‘positive’ score.

I thought I’d do a quick review of these pages for the UK’s top national museums. You can see the results in a simple Google Spreadsheet. The good news is that all of the museums I looked at had an average score of either 4 or 4.5 stars out of 5. There were also over 1931 reviews, with four museums having over 200 each. Finally, there are some common themes which the reviews touch upon, such as the ‘collection’, ‘food’ and ’service’. To get the most out of these reviews, however, you’ll have to read through them individually to get a sense of people’s visit experiences.

As well as the reviews, Google’s Place Pages also support ‘user content’ in the form of photos, videos and relevant web pages/blog posts. Google have also started to offer to take panoramic photos within certain select locations via its Business Photos free service, currently only available in a few cities in the US, Japan and Australia. It sounds to me almost to be a re-run of the dot-com era boom for ‘360 degree photo walkthrough’. (I wonder how many museums still have these available online?)

All of this activity points towards a race amongst the big US media companies to become ‘the’ destination and source for geographical and business information. In this race, if Google is the incumbent (who is rapidly trying to add ’social’ features in order to remain relevant), the the up-starts are Gowalla and Foursquare.

I’ve only experienced Gowalla, but I believe that Foursquare provides a similar service. Both use apps installable on mobile phones to allow people to ‘check in’ to locations and attractions that they visit, with ‘leaderboards’ and ‘badges’ to reward regular check-ins. Whilst both are ostensibly game-like, they clearly also hold huge value as socially-driven databases of places to go and visit. Personally speaking, I’ve found Gowalla’s photo feature to be the most compelling. Each day, I walk through the Winter Garden in Sheffield, part of the Millennium Galleries. It’s a beautiful spot – a kind of miniature Kew Gardens – and so I’ve taken to the habit of capturing a new photo each day, which then gets virtually ‘dropped’ in the spot, for others to discover (see the photos). You might think that this isn’t that different to Flickr, or other existing services, but something about the located-ness of it makes it somehow more interesting and immediate.

Museums are well-represented on Gowalla – take a look at the British Museum spot, for instance – but I’m not sure yet what the opportunities for museums to directly interact with it are. (Given that Gowalla hasn’t announced a business or revenue model yet, I guess it’s still early days).

If there’s a conclusion to all this, it’s that users are interacting with, reviewing, and sharing content about museums in ever-newer destinations. Museums would do well to take note of these destinations, to interact where there is the opportunity to do so, and to monitor and read the reviews at the very least.

However, I also offer a brief cautionary note. Whilst the fact that these destination pages offer less control to museums and business owners isn’t new (this is the way that the web works), a bigger potential issue is that these destinations all offer ‘generic’ user experiences, whereas museums themselves can offer more bespoke, tailored user experiences. There’s a trade-off here between the power of the big media brands to achieve audiences and scale, and the ability of the museums to do something special and unique. I suspect the answer is that we’ll need both, but the question of where to spend resources is never far away.

If Google were to announce that it was going to photograph museum collections and create a page-per-object connected to its Place Pages (which isn’t unfeasible) – would you accept?

I will start with a confession: the title of this post is really a lie – I’m mostly writing about the last fortnight in cultural heritage.  As one of those stranded overseas by Iceland’s volcanic ash, my post-Museums and the Web conference week was oddly disrupted, and it’ll be a while longer again before I’m caught up on everything else I was meant to be doing in those eight days.

I arrived in Denver early to take part in the Wikimedia@MW2010 workshop.  I’ve been reflecting on the results for several days, and I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on it.  At first, I felt that museums and Wikimedia were two ships that passed in the night, however friendly and well-intentioned the waving between them.  I didn’t feel we really engaged with the big issues between museums and Wikimedia on the day, though perhaps this was too much to expect with a large group in just one day.  Each group is decentralised  – individual Wikimedians must answer to the distributed community of Wikimedians, and a single museum cannot speak for any other museum – so while there was lots of interesting discussion, it’s difficult to pinpoint any big headline outcomes from the meeting.

However, in the short term the real result will probably be lots of smaller partnerships that will map the path to future discussions through their successes and failures.  It may be that the only way to really understand each other is to encounter and resolve a thousand tiny misunderstandings.  I hope that these projects will help us learn more about each others’ motivations, difficulties and issues (perhaps even to understand enough to feel empathy) so that we can work together to help everyone access quality content and experiences online. After all, as one of the keynote speakers said, ‘we’re all dedicated to preserving human knowledge’.

Discussions about automated harvesting and publishing at the technical breakout session started me thinking about what become one of the themes I mused on of the rest of conference.  While there are basic technical issues that we need to solve to provide a core level of service to the wider community, we will always need curators to define and select objects and stories that are of more intrinsic interest. We all have hero objects, and we all have more widgets than heroes, even if your widgets are pottery sherds or flying ants rather than spark plugs.

I think we will also see an increasing demand for curators, educators and specialists who can communicate with distributed communities of visitors who want to continue accessing and learning with collections regardless of the barriers of time and space.

Personal highlights of the MW2010 conference were Thursday’s ‘Collections: Tag / Search / Deploy’ papers, and the unconference. [At that stage we didn't know we'd be holding a few more to keep ourselves occupied while grounded] There were several interesting papers I didn’t get to see in other sessions – luckily all the papers are online so I can catch up with them later.  I was also involved in the creation of the Spinny Bar Historical Society, which effectively demonstrated that with a bit of know-how, several social media addicts and about $100 you could create an effective, multi-channel online presence for a small organisation in just 24 – 48 hours. The SBHS even has a collections management system, though we admit that in this case it did help to have their CEO at the conference.

The end of the conference was somewhat overshadowed by anxious thoughts of being stranded in Denver.  As those fears turned to reality, we were able to make the most of it, organising further unconferences, meals and frisbee sessions as well as simply banding together and working in the same space.

The ‘mobile games’ post-MW2010 unconference session at Leela’s Cafe

“Can museum content creators move 2 pace of journalists?”

tweeted Effie Kapsalis, reporting from Seb Chan’s presentation at Museums and the Web 2010 in Denver, Colorado.

Since I wasn’t at MW2010, just attending vicariously via Twitter and the Conference.archimuse.com website, it was kind of frustrating to be catching snatches of conversations that really rang bells, based on my own experiences at 24 Hour Museum and Culture24.

Effie’s tweet drew an instant response from me: I don’t think museum content curators can work at the pace of journalists. Word for word, published piece for piece, journalists work at a massively faster rate than most museum content teams.

Now that’s not a statement or a judgement about quality, necessarily. It’s just that fully skilled-up professional journalists come out of a working environment and training that’s all about speed. It’s common for journalists in a regional newsroom to have an hour or less to turn round a story that will require research, phone calls to check facts, interview contacts, source pictures and more.

In the museum, we’re typically dealing with much slower-burning stories and content. Unless the museum website has a busy schedule of events and exhibition news, there’s not much call for a fast churn rate of content on the homepage of the site.

Or is there? It’s web publishing orthodoxy that the more you change your content, the more people visit your site. Whatever website I’ve run, in the last twelve years that I’ve been editing, has demonstrated this notion. So even if you’re not really doing very much in terms of museum or heritage activity, there’s always something you can write about on the site.

There’s the obvious things to write about: event and lecture listings, news about forthcoming exhibitions and longer features about particular things going on in the museum. Beyond that, what about the less obvious things going on? How about news about people in the museum, or long-serving volunteers, or curator’s views or tours by experts of the collection? It’s all fair game.

Back to Effie’s Tweet: the discussion escaped from the #MW2010 hashtag forum on Twitter and some MCG members explored the remarks about museum content curators and journalists. One person wondered if the #MW2010 discussion meant we’d all need to become ‘broadcasters’ and when all this work would occur.

Someone else [Janet Davies] pointed out, in response, that the real job here was for museums and heritage sites to learn to tell their own stories more effectively. And this is kind of where the story on Twitter rested. I agree with Janet, very strongly.

There was lots of comment at #MW2010 about how museums need to get better at publishing. Here the intention, I’d hazard a guess, was to suggest a broad definition of the term broadcasting – not high-end TV but web publishing in a flexible range of formats, probably, mostly simple web content. We need to get better at working in a quicker way, and to aspire to working in ways that begin to compare with the rest of the digital publishing sector.

Getting back to that speed thing. Why do professional journalists work faster than museum content people? Well, generally, a trained journalist knows how to get pictures for free, is able to make assumptions about copyright law and can shape the story on the hoof. If you can’t get picture a) from source a), you go for picture b) from source b), even if it means the story may change slightly. You shape the story to suit the resources, because you’re up against a deadline.

In digital journalism, there’s no paper trail or a rights register to follow a piece of content. The story is written, it’s published, and if it’s republished or fed out via RSS any third party copyright material attending the story is often stripped out automatically by the publisher’s CMS. No danger there, and the system takes care of third party rights.

There’s also less waiting around for sign-off. When a story is filed for publication by a journalist, it’ll go to a sub-editor who checks it and uploads it quickly. It will be subbed again before publication but that’s all there is to the chain of publication. In many museums and galleries there’s a complicated set of sign-offs which content has to negotiate. We know those sign-offs are there for a reason; but I’d suggest it may be possible to circumvent some levels of decision-making.

Looking in the back pages of the Museums Journal recently at the variety of jobs on offer [a smallish number of jobs, of course!] I didn’t see any for web content creation people. One or two were for web project managers, who were expected to double up as writers, or to liase with curatorial staff who would do the writing. A few months back I did see a web content creator post advertised – but the required skills nothing to do with journalism or interactive publishing.

I think it’s high time more museums realised that to become more web content literate as producers, we need to look outside of the traditional museum sector skill set and see who else has the skills we want. Culture24’s success at Museums and the Web 2010 [the site won a Best of the Web award, it's second] is at least partly founded on the excellence of the journalistic approach of the site. So let’s see more journalists working in our museums!

[This week's guest post is by Jeremy Ottevanger, Web Developer at Museum of London

Pecker up, Buttercup!
Following the uplifting experience of the 2009 Jodi Awards, I vowed to stop being such a miserable sod and to blog some optimism. Well, due to some duplicity on the part of the space-time continuum that never happened, so now is my chance to set that straight. I have to confess upfront that I suddenly have my own particular reason for feeling optimistic (I’ve got a new job), and in contrast I know some of you may be facing all sorts of work-related strife of your own, and you have my heartfelt sympathy. I hope you can see it through.

For you more than anyone, though, you who are struggling with motivation or threatened by the state of public finances and politics, as well as those of you in happy and healthy organisations, why not stand back for a moment and say “this is digital heritage, ain’t it grand?” So here’s are three overlapping reasons why I think digital heritage is in good shape, and getting better. I’ve picked out big-picture things and largely neglected more specific and enervating stuff – cool apps, innovative ideas, exciting content – but why not add a comment with the top 3 things that excite you? Be as broad or specific as you like, and we can crowd-source a list of guaranteed-to-titillate digital heritage slam-dunkers to go along with the Best of the Web awards coming up at Museums and the Web 2010 next week in Denver.

#1 An awesome community
I’m sure many other professions have vibrant communities of practice, but it’s striking in ours where expertise is spread so thinly across the globe. The Museums & the Web conference, those of the MCG and MCN (call for papers out this week) along with their mailing lists, and many other irregular meetings worldwide really do seem to bust the bounds of geography that make it unlikely there’s more than a handful of practitioners in any given city. Together with Twitter, blogs, social sites like Museum 3.0 and conference.archimuse.com, LinkedIn and all the rest it can sometimes even become too intense (right?). A few years ago I was content in my job and was part of a good, motivated team, but didn’t really participate much in a bigger community; since waking up to what I was missing I feel better informed, more engaged and networked, and I would hope I am a stronger museum technologist and more valuable asset to my museum. It’s a pretty healthy ecosystem, it’s growing all the time, and we all benefit from it.

My big caveat to this, or what I want to see change, is that the networks on my radar are composed almost entirely of practitioners in the English-speaking world. There are some invaluable exceptions – especially people from countries where speaking excellent English is as common as speaking the native tongue – but when it comes to sharing experience with Asia, Africa, South America or much of Europe we’re at the stage of sending and receiving the occasional diplomatic mission, not of building truly global communities (Taiwan is the exception here in having its own thriving chapter of MCN, and Europeana is also a network as much as a project). Digital heritage being what it is, in principle we have the opportunity to do things that can’t be done in the real world, like creating new or impossible intercontinental collections, services and aggregations of knowledge and creativity. This sort of collaboration, though, really needs to start with networks of people, and we need to make these more global. Of course, starting (relatively) small and then trying to scale is a way to approach this. Which takes us smoothly to Thing 2…

#2 Networked knowledge
I’m not going to do an API/Linked Data/Semantic Web/federated search thing here, only say that after a decade of stuttering starts I believe that we are seeing the true beginnings of properly networked (or at least massively aggregated) knowledge. This has been built on top of hard-won standards, and has recently been given a huge boost by a number of governments opening up their data and encouraging people to find ways to hook it all together. This includes UK.gov opening up big-time (Ordnance Survey, you can come out now, you need no longer be ashamed of yourself. It’s worth remembering that this is the Dr Jeckyll aspect of the UK government: Mr Hyde, on the other hand, just passed the Digital Economy Bill, and who can love that?

Why is this important? Well cultural heritage data is fine on its own terms, but I think we’ve come to realise over the past few years that hooking it together with more of the same is great in itself but limited: knitting it into a wider ecosystem of data is what will really make the network effects take off, so the a glut of new non-heritage data sources appearing now really could provide that impetus.

You may not be surprised to see me mention Europeana here, too. Whatever else it is, it’s the grandest experiment yet in what happens if you mass structured cultural heritage content together from many different countries and lanaguages, and how you do it in the first place. The challenge is every bit as much about gaining consensus from participants who always have the option to pull out, as it is about technical problems, and I don’t know of another project that has braved quite this challenge before in
digital heritage. Anything we learn is good, but with any luck we’ll end up with a core of content massive enough to attract all sorts of unexpected attention and novel uses. That’s the strength of networked knowledge.

#3 Professionalisation, recognition and integration
Lots of the people I know in this game got into it in the same way as I did: entirely by accident. Many picked up their tech skills on their semi-random walk from somewhere in the arts, the sciences, maybe a museum studies degree (but a few have built on a proper education in computer science). As a result my peers have amazingly diverse backgrounds and each brings a unique perspective to digital heritage. This is surely partly why we have such vibrant discussions and creative ideas zipping about.

And yet, it’s also time for professionalisation, and it’s coming. In the UK I know of several universities running courses in digital heritage and digital preservation or relevant modules on museum studies courses*. A deepening literature and progressive theorisation of the discipline all play a part too, as do the communities of practice and partnerships I mentioned before. We need museum management to recognise that our work is a valid branch of museological practice, peopled by skilled specialists possessing knowledge you can’t find in a coder plucked off the street, and that we can shine a new light on the museum’s mission.

So whilst it would be a shame if we lost all the diversity that the first colonisers of this “museum computing” space brought over its first couple of decades (ok, Ross, let’s say four decades), I’m sure that professionalisation and recognition are worth a bit of a trade-off in that regard. But not too much, I hope.

For an example of professionalisation and recognition we can probably look at the overlapping field of archaeological computing, where some of the most proactive people in the digital heritage community actually work. From my glancing acquaintance with academic and commercial archaeology it strikes me that practitioners are recognised as another kind of archaeologist, just like geoarchaeologists, finds specialists, osteologists or geomatics folks, rather than being seen as the necessary nerd in the corner. Museum computing and archaeological computing are twins serving different masters, but the one is regarded quite differently to the other and it will be good if we see that situation improve.

*check this distance learning MA out: http://www.le.ac.uk/ms/study/digitalheritage.html. I must declare an interest (like half the MCG board), but it’s a ground-breaking beast.

#4 the iPad
Ah well why not have an unplanned fourth thing? I’ve been way too serious so far, and anyway the iPad is the talk of the week I’m meant to be covering. Whether it turns out to be the long-awaited paradigm-shifter and market-maker for slate-style gizmos, or merely a cool toy we’ll have forgotten in a couple of years, well, it’s certainly got us talking about what we can do with something like that – when it finally reaches these shores, of course. And I imagine there’ll be a small glut of them coming over at the end of MW2010…

That’s it, then. A list of things that make me think “hmm, this is a great profession and it’s getting better”, despite the Sisyphean sensation we often feel at the chalk-face. So, if your director thinks “social media” means a growth substrate for bacteria; if open data equates to an invitation to IP theft in the mind of your information managers; if, at your museum, any chance of failure is seen as worse than never developing; if your IT manager can recall their yearly targets but doesn’t know the museum’s purpose or values; if your manager is a marketer for whom “digital sustainability” means how long they can hold up two fingers at you; you have my sympathy, nay, my empathy. But surely these people are on borrowed time. No cultural heritage organisation that sees digital media as anything other than integral to achieving their purpose will succeed and grow - perhaps this is even more true during financially straitened times, which is one inference I take from both Nick Poole’s and Günter Waibel’s excellent recent posts – and so these myopic attitudes must inevitably die out. Funders will look at examples of places large and small that do it well and will ask searching questions of those institutions that haven’t worked out their place in this fast-evolving world. At that point, when a dazed-looking director knocks at your asking how your museum can “lead at digital” or some such vapid nonsense, as the realisation dawns that they’ve been missing something and no one’s going to pay them to fail their audiences forever, it falls to you, me, we to be prepared with a plan, a feel for what’s out there and what your gaff could be doing with some imagination, some support, and some cojones. Then you can show them a profession with rigour, cohesion, vitality and loads of whizzy stuff, and more opportunities than you can shake an accounting package at. I think that’s a pretty good place to be.

I can’t help but end on a selfish note that is a little at odds with the tenor of this post. As I mentioned earlier, my own reason for optimism is chiefly that I’ve been offered a really exciting new opportunity to work at the Imperial War Museum, which has put a spring in my step. Which means that, whilst I’m sure that attitudes to digital heritage will mature, accompanied by a recognition of the validity of the discipline, I’m not waiting around for that change to come to my present place of work. But maybe after 8 years of me they need me gone as much as I need to move on and it will do us all good to start again.

So, comment away with what gets you excited in digital heritage, I can’t wait to hear what you have to say.

This week there are two of us blogging – we decided we’d be able to cover more this way -  and we want to concentrate first on some stuff that’s been happening in digital learning. We’ll also pick out a few things that are going on in the cultural heritage online sector generally as well.

We’ve been asked before how e-learning/digital learning/online learning is different to other museum web/tech stuff, a lot of which is essentially about learning as well.  Just quickly then, online/digital learning is often defined by the fact that it caters for a particular audience, often particularly for schools.  This means that our roles and the focus of our jobs requires us to understand the specific needs of our audiences and be able to create inspiring and engaging learning experiences rather than on us developing the technology behind those experiences.

Game-based learning

The start of this week saw the Game-based Learning conference (hashtag: #gbl10).  The ideas from the conference to me (Claire) brought to the fore some of the untapped potential of games from the point of view of creating systemic changes in cultural learning and cultural learning spaces. Gaming itself is becoming more and more mainstream and it affects so much of our lives to the extent many of us don’t recognise it or that it has benefits, particularly for digital learning in museums, because the wealth of collections information to draw upon.

This month’s V&A Friday Late also had the theme of playgrounds, which was all about social gaming so this got me thinking further.  Their use of a role-playing game (RPG) to get people engaged was brilliant. An Expedition With Mr Mirrors, is a collaboration between Failbetter Games and  A Door In A Wall (ADIAW). The game brought to life inhabitants of Fallen London, the Victorian-inspired universe of  Echo Bazaar, a browser-based RPG with strong social and narrative dimensions.  Taking a browser-based game into a physical museum was brilliant and provided a one-of-a-kind experience. Much of Echo Bazaar’s draw comes from its unique manner of storytelling, something which museums could latch on to quite easily. Social gaming in cultural spaces is a really brilliant idea it encourages players to engage with each other and the space around them in a different way, producing more meaningful and unexpected engaging experiences.

Online games also give learners an enjoyable, engaging learning experience online.  Using games gets learners actively involved in their learning (contrasting with the more passive experience of listening to someone speak or reading something) and we know from tests that learners often remember what they have done more than what they have seen. A good example is the Museum of London’s new game,  Starting out, which my colleagues and I (Rhiannon) launched this week, which puts the player in the scenario of having just left school and moving to London, to teach Key Stage 4 students how to manage their money.

Digital Learning Network

The E-Learning Group for Museums, Libraries and Archives recently rebranded and has taken on a new, more informal ethos. It is now the Digital Learning Network (DLNet for short). The idea is to go back to basics and get people talking about technology and learning in museums, archives and libraries. There are so many people whose job involves some kind of learning/digital role, but who don’t have a support network and really depend on colleagues and informal relationships to share information about new developments. DLNet aims to help people to build networks in their area and organise ThinkDrinks, informal get-togethers in the pub, for a cup of tea, at the zoo, wherever people want to meet.  There is a  ThinkDrink happening on 13 April in the Southampton area, so if you live near, it would be worth a visit.

My Life as an Object
We’re both really enjoying following  My Life As An Object, a project run by Renaissance East Midlands working with Rattle. This project is now in it’s third week and is experimenting with encouraging audiences to engage with different objects in new and innovative ways.  The first week people were invited to interact with a bike which was given a personality and a voice on Twitter as @yellowchopper.  Last week we were invited to tell the story of a painting, Tea at Englefield Green, on Flickr.  This week we have been following the life of some  baby-weighing scales on Facebook .  Frankie Roberto is blogging about his work on the project on his blog as well and it’s interesting to read his perspective. It’s particularly refreshing to hear that this is a project which, rather than being about deliverables, accountability etc, is just about experimenting and seeing what happens.  It’ll be useful for all of us to hear what the outcomes of all the experiments are.

Rewired Culture conference
This happened last Saturday (27 March) and brought together developers from various cultural organisations for a hackday and an unconference to explore how to make links between data repositories such as museums and broadcasters and the wider community.  Neither of us attended this event but you can read about what the day was intended to do on the Rewired State blog and you can read about Brian Kelly’s account of what happened on the UKOLN blog.

Linked data
There has also been a lot of discussion around Linked data and what this could mean for museums.  You can read about Mia Ridge’s ideas about linked data, APIs and the Science Museum on the Museums and the machine-processable web wiki.  A meeting was held at the Collections Trust on 22 February (we realise this was a while ago but we don’t think anyone has blogged about it on the MCG blog yet) which you can read more about on Jeremy Ottevanger’s blog .

Europeana
I’ve (Claire) been looking at a lot of reports about Europeana this week.  It is an ambitious project to put Europe’s cultural heritage online.  Eurpeana acts as a portal to the collections of libraries, archives and museums from all around Europe, in essence links you to 6 million items. I have a particular interest in cross-collection searching and what it has to offer to museums, and more specifically to its users. UCL’s CIBER research group are undertaking a project to provide real-time monitoring and evaluation of the use and users of Europeana, a project to keep your eye on.

Museums and the Web 2010 is coming soon
It’s now only two weeks until the Museums and the Web conference in Denver.  All the papers for sessions are now online on the conference website. We both attended this conference last year and got a lot out of it so no doubt we’ll be following again this year through the hashtag #mw2010 – those of you that are going, please keep us informed on what’s interesting!

This week I came across the launch of the Connected Histories Project.  Once completed this aims to become the first port of call for researching historical sources by linking up existing databases. This sounds like an exciting project for archives, historians and academics. But it got me thinking, what about our sector? Could we actually create a search facility for researchers pointing at basic catalogue records across museums? I know that Croydon’s embarrassing offer Research Croydon, hidden away on the internet, generates legitimate enquiries and even the odd image sale. Would the number of satisfied researchers increase if they were able to search through one interface? I feel that if we got this right, it would be a resource that researchers would actually use. Even so, with the best will in the world I also realize that this is a long way off.

On Monday this week, the Museum of London posted a new video to their YouTube channel; curator Meriel Jeater introduces the new War, Plague and Fire gallery. It was fun to have a virtual nose around the gallery and interesting to listen to Meriel explain what they’ve done. Yet 3 days later and 161 views there isn’t much interaction from users. No comments, or video responses and only 1 rating. I noticed the figures tell a similar story for videos on YouTube channels posted by other museums, such as the V&A’s trailer for their Quilts exhibition.

The Museum of Croydon had its moment of fame courtesy of Harry Hill’s TV Burp on 6th March. Harry has immortalized our museum and specifically our Riesco gallery of Chinese ceramics in his ‘I love Croydon’ ditty. There are at least 4 versions of the relevant clip and song from the show on YouTube that I have come across, totalling over 30,000 views with 100s of comments and ratings. For the following 4 days our web stats showed that we had doubled the amount of unique visitors to our site, the majority of which came from Harry Hill related referrals.

This plug was quite timely for us as through the National Regional Loans Scheme we’re working with the BritishMuseum on a revamp of our Riesco Chinese ceramics gallery. So this autumn, in the words of Harry, “Get your ancient Chinese ceramics in Croydon”!

What can all of this tell us? Museums are creating YouTube videos but only a small number of users watch them and an even smaller number interact with them. YouTube’s front page shows us their most popular videos. Users are catching up on TV programmes, getting their celebrity fixes and watching those random funnies. We were lucky with the ‘I love Croydon’ song, it’s funny, catchy, encompasses lots of the good facets of Croydon and the Museum comes across fairly well. I am however yet to be convinced that museums can create meaningful content that YouTubers want to watch.